


everybody wants to change the world (but no-one wants to die)

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [9]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Chasind Hawke, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post Qunari Attack, Rebuilding, Red Hawke, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, champion of kirkwall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 12:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12984519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: 'Kirkwall is on fire, and Hawke is still in the middle of it. Days ago, she shoved the broken hilt of her sword clean through the Arishok’s throat. Meredith called her Champion. Hawke doesn’t want it.'While the city of Kirkwall burns in the wake of the Qunari attack, Hawke, despite her attempts to do anything but, becomes involved in politics. Set in the aftermath of Act 2.





	everybody wants to change the world (but no-one wants to die)

The Arishok’s axe takes up the entirety of her weapons rack, placed there when she dragged herself home for a change of armour before heading back into the fray; his off-hand sword has become her new go-to blade, strapped to her back where her old one was shattered during their duel. Hawke has heard that for Qunari, their weapons are their souls. Good, she thinks – for all the death that occurred over the Qunari and their relic and their faith, it feels good to hold their fallen leader’s soul and use it to hurt: it’s all it has ever been good for.

The city is on fire. Literally, and figuratively. The Circle mages have spent days dousing the flames with ice spells, under constant vigilance by their templar minders. Meredith, Orsino and Elthina have been shouting up the Gallows, the Chantry, Hightown squares, the Viscount’s Fort – Hawke can’t keep up with it, doesn’t have the patience to, not when Bethany almost died during the attack on the city, when Isabela was behind almost every damn problem in the city for the past six years, when she and Aveline have been on their feet for what feels like weeks, clearing rubble with the guards and pulling corpses out of seemingly every corner and alleyway in Kirkwall. Fenris helped until he couldn’t any longer, the burning pavement of Hightown scorching his bare feet until he couldn’t walk any longer without calling on his markings. Hawke had sent him home, Varric leaving with him to check on the state of things in Lowtown, and saying something about taking him to the healer who lives in the sewers. Isabela has been hovering around the edge of her vision for the past three days, like that will absolve her – Hawke hates liars, hates being lied to, doesn’t know what to make of the fact that Bela lied, Bela left, Bela came back. They had always understood each other, if from a few steps away and looking at one another diagonally – both were rough women who carved their place out in the world, who took up space as a challenge. Over the years, they haven’t agreed on everything, or even much, but they had been friends.

Kirkwall is on fire, and Hawke – Hawke doesn’t know. So she barks orders and follows Aveline’s and ignores the Knight Commander’s and shouts at more than one member of the nobility, who flutter nervously and wring their hands and skirts, who take up space when they ought to be back in their Hightown mansions, or at the very least spending their coin on aiding the reparation efforts – paying for medicine, for lyrium for the mage healers, for reconstruction of the docks and most of Lowtown, wood and ramshackle buildings mowed down by the rampaging Qunari in ways that the black stone of the upper city wasn’t. She says as much, at one point – near the end of her rope, shouts at Ser Whatever du She Doesn’t Care that the nobility has done nothing but weep and whine and take up space while the templars and the guard put things back to rights, while the elves in the alienage have already rebuilt most of their apartments with help from Merrill and Lia’s father, and Marethari has even shown her face at the feet of the Vhenandal.

“Make yourself useful or get out of my face,” she snarls at the shocked nobleman, after her tirade, and he runs with his tail between his legs, but the next day he’s there directing a team of mercenaries he’s hired to help clear the rubble in the city.

Hawke thinks of her father, how he often shouted, voice harsh and deep, unforgiving in the face of their fears or mistakes, his high expectations. Has she met them, she wonders. She thinks not: she is the last Hawke standing. When the thought crosses her mind, she can almost hear the crack of his palm across her face for thinking it, for allowing it to happen. Her hair is shorn short, curling uncontrollably into her eyes, uneven where she chopped her braids off in a fit after mother’s death. Lately, it has been clotted with blood more often than not, or heavy with ash, and soot, and dust, with grime and debris caught in it, grease making it heavy. Hawke doesn’t have time for a bath, as much as it would likely comfort Orana to draw one. She has the girl and Bodhan distributing food to the displaced in Lowtown – she told Gamlen to go with them, but she doesn’t know if he did, doesn’t have the means or the care to check. He doesn’t work like her, he’d shouted when Mother died; he can’t push everything aside and keep marching forward when things go wrong. She tries not to hold it against him. He was never a soldier.

Kirkwall is on fire, and Hawke is still in the middle of it. Days ago, she shoved the broken hilt of her sword clean through the Arishok’s throat. Meredith called her Champion. Hawke doesn’t – she doesn’t want it, doesn’t need it, it was bad enough having people stare at her for being Leandra Amell’s savage refugee daughter, now they call her Champion, now they’re asking her advice about ruling the city, they asked her to sort the Qunari problem and now the Viscount and his heir are dead, and she carries the Qunari leader’s soul on her back.

She deals with the here and now, does what she does best. Lady Elegant keeps sending her stamina potions, knowing her too well from their Red Iron days to imagine her stopping to rest. She’s right. (Meeran perished during the attacks, Meeran and his men, and Hawke doesn’t know what to think about it, that the Red Iron are no more.)

Bran, at the very least, seems to be against this nonsense as much as she is. He didn’t like her much, never did, not when she was a mercenary, not when she rescued Seamus – and that’s one more death she must carry, and she remembers drinking with him and Elegant at parties and wants to break something with her bare hands – and not when the Viscount called on her day and night to try and find a solution to the situation on the docks. He still doesn’t like her now, and a part of her thinks, well, at least with mother gone she won’t have to have him for father-in-law, with how much mother teased her with his son. The thought hurts. Hawke takes Aveline, Merrill and Varric down to the Wounded Coast to hunt any Qunari or Tal-Vashoth stragglers down along with a small contingent of guards. Donnic survived, which she supposes she is happy about, for Aveline’s sake at least. The guards are wary of Hawke, after she threatened half of them as deserters on the coast months ago. Still, they get the job done. The thoughts in her head are no quieter for it.

Hawke finally goes home to rest after nearly a week of standing up, when Aveline and Varric and Elegant and all the others force her home. Bodhan comes to fetch her personally, chatters about his son as he guides her through the city; Hawke isn’t really listening, too bone-deep exhausted to pay attention to it. They cross Bethany – she’s in her Circle robes with a templar at her side, looking lyrium crazed and tired, eyes puffy and twitchy the way they always are when she doesn’t sleep. The sisters Hawke, forever in tune. Even a cadaver standing, Hawke still frightens the templar off so that Bethany can sleep at the Estate tonight, and her sister laughs, rubs her eyes. It might cause her trouble down the road, but she’ll take it, she says. Gamlen is in front of the empty hearth – there’s been enough fire these days – with bottles around him: he can’t sleep, isn’t used to seeing death every day the way they are. Hawke leaves him be, takes her sister upstairs. They share a bath like they haven’t since they were children, too sleepy to do much but wipe away sweat and grime. Hawke scours each inch of Bethany’s skin with eyes like their hawk-namesake for bruises or scars or signs of templar misuse, and sees none. It’s a good thing: if she had, she’d have torn the Gallows down brick by brick, stone by fucking stone dropping into the sea. They fall asleep in Hawke’s bed. They don’t talk about Mother, or about Meredith and Orsino, or even about the Estate that Bethany had wanted so damn much.

In the morning, Bethany returns to the Circle. There are over twenty letters from various members of the Kirkwall nobility – Champion, aid our endeavour to… Champion, do you support the motion to ask… Champion, would you come to the Chantry on this day three days ago… -- Hawke wants to flip the desk, but if she did, Orana would just get meek and quiet the way she does when she remembers Hadriana, and she doesn’t need that right now. She wants to sleep. She wants to get back outside and help with the rebuilding. She wants time to mourn her mother. There will be no funeral, not when she died so closely before the Qunari attack; instead there is a communal mass at the Chantry at the end of the week, when the totality of the bodies will have been found and burned. Kirkwall is a pyre. Hawke is furious that it will be an Andrastian ceremony, but – Mother was Andrastian. She pushes the feelings out of the way and settles on work. She said her prayers over Mother’s mutilated body, she went through her rituals when she cut off her braids. There’s no point in lingering. There never is. Life goes on.

Meredith names herself interim leader of Kirkwall, shuts down any requests from nobles for meetings, ignores any calls for election. Bran gets kicked out of the Gallows by a templar, and the news makes it to Hightown in the hour. Hawke is invited to so many events that she starts automatically feeding them to the hearth, until Varric and Aveline stop her. She spends her days fighting stragglers on the coast or rebuilding houses in Lowtown and the alienage, working with Lirene’s shop like no time passed at all, goes home and bathes, and then spends evenings meeting with nobles who stumble over her name and stare at her weapons, her tattoos, her scars, all the things that mark her as foreign to their world. She brings Merrill, when Merrill can be dragged away from her people; otherwise, she and Elegant drink together, missing the third member of their trio. Hawke has become synonym with fixer for all the nobility’s problems, it seems, and she drinks expensive mead and longs for the Hanged Man. She never imagined this when she fled the Blight. She wonders if Mother and Father knew this would happen when they eloped. She’s so tired. She bullies more noble cousins and friends of her mother’s into giving charity to the displaced and the refugees. She acts as go-between for Hubert and their workers once more. She barely sleeps.

Fenris finds her compulsively cleaning the Arishok’s weapons. He sits with her, and walks her through the process of sharpening a Qunari blade. Part of her wants to shout at him, wants to purposefully ruin it, temper it with her heathen human hands. Instead she sits in silence and follows his instructions. They spar in the courtyard, afterwards, he still ginger on his feet, she still unsteady from her numerous, numerous injuries. He shares news of Isabela when they stretch and drink cold water after they finish. She asks if he wants to take some of her mail to practice reading, and he tells her to fuck of. Together with Orana they bake bread and go distribute it. It helps.

She makes time for Wicked Grace, goes down to Varric’s private rooms in the Hanged Man and sits in silence like she always does, drinks on someone else’s tab the entire night because nobody will let the Champion of Kirkwall pay for her own drinks, lets everyone else share from her cup and folds after a few matches. Just listens to everyone. It isn’t as free as it used to be, but it’s her friends in one place.

“And to think you didn’t want to get involved in politics,” Varric teases her, catching her attention from where she’d been staring at the fireplace.

Hawke throws a knife at him, and he dodges it, laughing. At least somebody finds it funny.


End file.
